This paper aims to challenge the ways in which recognition is spoken about in frameworks of sexual rights. My intervention here is to show that there are different modes of queer being that are not only organised around questions of legal and civil recognition and a visibility that is articulated through a teleological narrative of ‘coming out’. I argue that such developmental frameworks of sexual rights operate on homonormative, homonationalist and orientalist terrains, further limiting our understandings of intimacies, queer subjectivities and queerness more broadly. Through looking at the active life of queer bodies in Kuwait, I discuss that in this context we cannot turn to the law for recognition because of its ambivalences, silences, and very real punishments. Instead, I look at the ways in which Kuwaiti queer subjects inhabit and negotiate norms through the creation, inhabitation, and movement across spaces. I develop an understanding of ‘spatial recognition’ to describe a form of recognition that is centred around agency, affect and spaces produced by social relations. This discussion will take place against the backdrop of a historicised socio-political context of Kuwait, including an analysis of law and meanings of sex/gender/sexuality.